Al Peaslee: You try eating T-bone steaks on $6,500

I’d like to pick a bone with The Journal on its reporting and commentary in recent months about the food-stamp program. One recent example: “Langevin, others to try SNAP program” (news, June 15) centers...

Comment

By
Al Peaslee
Posted Jul. 3, 2013 @ 12:01 am

I’d like to pick a bone with The Journal on its reporting and commentary in recent months about the food-stamp program. One recent example: “Langevin, others to try SNAP program” (news, June 15) centers on the perceived skimpy weekly benefits allocated to recipients.

U.S. Rep. James Langevin (D-R.I.) and other Democrats apparently will participate in a publicity stunt, whereby they will “limit their food budget to $4.50 per day,” to protest proposed cuts by Republicans.

This story and several others seen in The Journal (see also “You try eating on $31.50 per week,” Oct. 31, 2011, column by Ed Fitzpatrick) are at the very least irresponsibly vague on the numbers. Salesmen use this tactic to get you to spend more on your purchase than you budgeted: “Surely, Mr. Prospect, you can afford $3 a day to ensure your family’s security.” They do not mention that $3 a day is $1,095 per year.

Let’s chew on this: $4.50 a day is indeed the average per person daily food-stamp benefit, which translates to $31.50 per week. Thus, a family of four would receive $125 per week, or $6,500 per year.

It is flat-out inconceivable that a family of four could not prepare three nutritionally balanced, healthy meals per day on a budget of that size (unless, of course, the congressman believes a juicy T-bone should grace the nightly plates of those using public assistance). Further, that $6,500 does not factor in the possibility that recipients might take a little personal financial responsibility in feeding their own families. Neither does it take into account the free breakfasts and school lunches provided to the children of this demographic.

My wife and I compared notes on our upbringing in the 1950s and ’60s. We were solidly middle class. While we don’t know the actual weekly budget in dollars for food that our parents operated under, we know how they spent it.

Our parents and their generation spent money budgeted for food as if it was their own, which as it turns out, it was.

So, is $6,500 a year enough to feed a family of four in 2013? You bet it is. And you know what? I’ll prove it to Mr. Langevin, if he can tear himself away from his theatrics for a week or two. I’ll even double down and say I can do it for $5,000.

The congressman will just have to leave his appetite for foie gras back in Washington. That’s the throw-down. Take me up on it, and when it is over one of us will be eating a little crow, and I don’t eat crow.

We can have an honest debate about why the food-stamp program has doubled over the last five years, or about how electronic-benefit-transfer cards (EBTs) take the embarrassment out of receiving public assistance or whether cute euphemisms like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) inoculate us against the essence of the deed.

We can have an honest debate about the fact that these benefits are used for purchases other than food, and that they are sold and traded on the black market, and whether candy or soda or fast food should be allowable under this program. We can have an honest debate about whether having 20 percent of the public on the program pushes up food costs for the rest of us, or that entitlement spending has us up to our gizzards in debt.

But we can’t have an honest debate on any of these topics if we can’t get some honest reporting and opinion from your paper. How about this for a headline: “Langevin calls for tax increase, joins Dems in protesting as ‘skimpy’ $6,500 in assistance to feed family of four.”

Or try this on your Commentary pages: “You try eating T-bone steaks on $6,500 a year.”